Faculty Book: Thomas Weiss

Thomas G. Weiss

Global Governance: What? Why? Whither?
(Polity Press, 2013)

This probing yet accessible book examines “global governance,” or the sum of the informal and formal values, norms, procedures, and institutions that help states, intergovernmental organizations, civil society, and transnational corporations identify, understand, and address trans-boundary problems. The book illuminates the chasm between the magnitude of a growing number of global threats—climate change, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, financial instabilities, pandemics—and the feeble contemporary political structures for international problem-solving. Can the framework of global governance help us to better understand the reasons behind this fundamental disconnect as well as possible ways to attenuate its worst aspects? The author offers a guardedly sanguine “yes.” Thomas G. Weiss is presidential professor of political science at the Graduate Center, where he also serves as director of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies.